40 Mac Freewares and Open Source Software for Web Designers

Although popular Adobe Creative Suite software or paid software as such are essential tools for web designers, not everyone can afford them or nor they need to buy it. Some of the free applications are really powerful, time-saving and gets the job done. In this article we have complied 40 best freeware and open source software for web designers.

This is first part of the freeware and open source software complication. The second part will have essential free windows software for web designers. Please note that GIMP, Pixelmator, Transmit or Cyberduck and popular software are excluded intentionally because there have been numerous post about them.

Picasa for windows was available for while. Now the mac user can also enjoy Picasa. Manage your photos in one place, and find photos you forgot you had,Eliminate scratches & blemishes, fix red-eye, crop and more.

Free Ruler is a free screen ruler for Mac OS X. Very useful if you measuring the width of height of something such a logo or anything in your webpage. A horizontal and vertical ruler which can be used independently or simultaneously.Independent resizing of rulers, from 200 pixels to 5000 pixels in length.

A simple and powerful photo editor for Leopard. LiveQuartz has all the essential tools: The drawing tools (brush, lines, rectangles, ovals), the duplication tool, the eraser tool, the new background eraser, the gradients, the layer moving arrow, the text tool, the CoreImage tool, the rectangle and lasso selections, the hand, and the magnifying glass.

With DrawBerry, you have all the possibilities the vectorial drawing offers you in a free, easy to use and powerful application. If you don’t need applications such Illustrator or Inkscape and you want to create some simple (or less simple) illustrations, DrawBerry is for you.

Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing.

Goldberg is a freeware image and movie viewer with image editing capabilities and support for applying QuickTime and other effects In my opinion there is not too many features to work with beside the QuickTIme effects.

Text Editor and WYSIWYG Editors

Scribus is an open-source program which has user-friendly interface. Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

CreaText has got many functions which make creating websites easier, e.g. Tag Coloring, easy access to the Mac browsers, the change of special characters into HTML entities in realtime, an Insert menu with rapid access to all usual HTML commands, an HTML color chooser, drag & drop, and the possibility to setup HTML parameters when creating a new document.

You miss a text editor able to open, edit and save plain text files? You want special features such as foreground and background colors? Text wrapping and unwrapping? Unlimited number of undo? Then Plain Text Editor is what you need!

WPWriter is a simple HTML editor that is designed to assist you to write WordPress articles easily.Many of web designers run blogs where they publish post daily. This could come in really handy. WordPress has a built-in visual HTML editor, whose editing area is quite small and cannot be changed.

WebTide text editor is a free text editor, designed to help web developers in creating fast and professional websites. It is also a programmer text editor. It supports HTML, PHP, CSS and many other scripting languages

WebCode is a html source editor that assists the developer writing code. WebCode’s inserts system is fully customizeable, the built in inserts will place things like … around the selection. With the Command-B keyboard equivalent. You can add your own inserts, or modify the existing ones as you like.

This a must have software for web designers. Xyle scope is an elegant analysis tool for everyone interested in web standards. It’s like surfing the web with an X-ray view. Using Xyle scope you will deepen your understanding of XHTML and CSS, find out how your peers did it, and see your own work with fresh eyes.

You can use the CSS Validator, Markup Validator and Feed Validator to validate your CSS, HTML and feeds, or you can test them all with Tart. Also Tart can validate local files, even when you’re offline, since it is a standalone application!!

Markup is a general purpose HTML utility. It replaces <, >, and & in text so that html markup characters will show up correctly in a web browser (without breaking the page). The color chooser allows users to get hex values for RGB colors, colors from the color picker, or to choose from one of the many named HTML colors in the color list.

Your compilation was just freaking awesome!
Got here via google after first having found Gimp, which sure is a great program I wish to learn, but it’s not quite the size of a cup of tea for making some gif’s with about one color for the sidebars ….

I have actually bought BBEdit, and I love it!
I’d choose textwrangler as second to none, having used BBEdit.

Thanks *alot*

Mr.Firefox

It’s impressive that you have a design related site, but then this exact post appear very badly in firefox 3 !